An Unquiet Mind Book Report

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Kay Redfield Jamison, author of the autobiography An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Jamison, 1995), is a 51 year old White female. She was born into a military family and moved around the world and the United States until age 15, when her father retired from service and took a job in California, taking his family with him. Jamison continues her education at a new high school where she struggles with the transition to a new location and lifestyle and changing dynamics within her family as her father begins his new job. Eventually, Jamison attends UCLA as an undergraduate student in psychology and joins one of her professor’s research laboratories. Upon graduation, she continued her education at the university through their doctorate …show more content…

38). The major swing between elation and depression that Jamison experiences is a clear sign of the one necessary symptom of Bipolar I disorder, and these swings do not go away throughout the book. Later on, in describing another mood shift, Jamison says, “my classwork during these galvanized periods seemed very straightforward, and I found examinations, laboratory work, and papers almost absurdly easy” (Jamison, 1995, p. 44) before saying “my mood would crash and my mind again would grind to a halt. I lost all interest in my schoolwork, friends, reading, wandering, or daydreaming” (Jamison, 1995, p. 44). The drastic and immediate mood shift shown here is another case of this swing from elation to depression, as shown in the anhedonia Jamison experiences in the second quote. Another symptom Jamison experiences is racing thoughts, with one instance being described as “My thoughts were so fast that I couldn’t remember the beginning of a sentence halfway through. Fragments of ideas, images, sentences raced around and around in my mind.” (Jamison, 1995, p.

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